School Accountability Under NCLB: Aid or Obstacle for Measuring Racial Equity?
Introduction
At the core of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) are
relatively simple but controversial accountability provisions: all schools and districts must meet state standards by 2014. When NCLB was enacted, researchers and state education officials projected that a high percentage of schools would fail to meet the law’s tough accountability provisions, creating a crisis in public education and overwhelming the capacity of state education agencies to help low performing schools. Others bet that the law would be changed before the full effect of the requirements were felt, reflecting the view that the requirements as written were not sustainable and that the Administration would relax its enforcement and Congress would amend the law in response to state and local preferences.
With the law in its fifth year and up for reauthorization in 2007, now is a good time to review state progress towards meeting the NCLB accountability requirements. What we are finding is that many schools, once identified as needing improvement, are not moving out of improvement status and new schools continue to be added to the list of schools needing improvement. However, interpreting changes in the number of schools identified as needing improvement is complicated by how the law has been interpreted and implemented. In the face of mounting political opposition to the law, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) modified many of the law’s requirements that affect the number of schools and districts identified for improvement (Sunderman, 2006; Tracey, Sunderman, & Orfield, 2005). In addition, the law itself requires higher proficiency standards and testing in more grades than it did in the first years of implementation, further complicating year-by-year comparisons.
We conclude from the analysis presented in this policy brief that AYP and the state proficiency targets are not very informative when it comes to determining educational progress because of the ways the law has been changed. The AYP data does not allow us to say whether schools are getting better because some states have retained their original standards while others have modified them. Since states are going in opposite directions—some states report a decline in the number of schools identified for improvement while others report an increase—it is difficult to know how much progress has been made improving student performance.
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